Experimental And Numerical Analysis Of The Bending Property Of An Aerogel Composited Glass Unit

The SiO2 aerogels are new kinds of mesoporous materials with many peculiar properties.It has many outstanding physical properties,especially for thermal and acoustical insulation.These exceptional physical properties made SiO2 aerogels perfect materials for thermal insulation building material.However,its fragile mechanical property has against it for engineering application.In an aerogel composited glass unit aerogels can be protected by placing the aerogels between two glass plates and this novel glazing system will greatly improve the insulation property of existing buildings.As space heating and cooling in buildings consumed a huge amount of energy and produced lots of greenhouse gases,the application of the aerogel composited glass units is become imperative to reduce the whole energy consumption.This dissertation aims at investigating the bending property of an aerogel composited glass unit and how does each glass plate work together when the unit is under a uniformly distributed loads.(1)According to the structural characteristics of an aerogel composited glass unit,several assumptions were employed to simplify the mechanical behavior of the aerogel composited glass unit.Since the shear transferred in the interlayer is negligible,the bending property of the aerogel composited glass unit resembles that of a layered glass system.A numerical analysis method based on a layered glass system is illustrated in this paper.(2)In order to verify the numerical models,an experimental research was carried out.Ten different specimens were tested under uniformly distributed loads.The experimental results showed that the interlayer thickness and glass plate thickness are the main factors influencing the bending property of the aerogel composited glass unit.The experimental results also suggested that the assumptions which were employed in the numerical method are valid when the difference of glass sheets rigidity is small,but they become inapplicable when the difference of glass sheets rigidity becomes much greater.(3)In order to study the bending property of the aerogel composited glass units with more accuracy,an improved model which treated the structural behavior of each glass plate as a plate on elastic supports is developed to investigate the bending property of the aerogel composited glass and the load sharing of each glass plate is obtained by using this model.The numerical results of this improved model are consistent with the experimental results.